Publish at March 03 2021 Updated February 14 2024
What's the hairdresser's favorite extension? .TIFF of course!Hairdressing robot joke from the unlikely future
There's nothing like humor to make you feel better and take the sting out of a situation. A well-placed word will always have a chance of stealing a smile. Humor can be a useful tool in a variety of situations, from teaching to personal care. While humor has a strong human dimension, some science fiction writers associate it with machines. Is humor a human trait? Could this play of the heart and sensibility, as Jules Renard called it, be encoded in a machine?
Humor is a mechanism, plural, natural, complex and interwoven in our social interactions. Whether it's a pun, a derision or even a joke, humor is proposed as a human social skill, implying both a minimum of knowledge of the interlocutor and a mastery of the spontaneity of the action. Whatever the tone, it is a form of wit designed to magnify the absurdity or comedy of a situation at the most opportune moment.
Welcome to the theme of Lucile Bechade's thesis entitled"Humor in human-robot social interactions", in which she develops the concept of humor and the interest of its application in the context of human-robot social interactions.
The main aim of this thesis is to improve the social capabilities of human-machine conversational systems by outlining the very concept of humor and modeling it in such a way as to make it sensitive to the user's reactions, thereby strengthening human-machine links and reinforcing common ground and trust.
The central question of this thesis work is: "How can humor be integrated into human-robot conversation in such a way as to adapt it to the user's reactions?" In order to answer this, the student approaches the question from two angles: a theoretical part covering definitions of humor according to multiple disciplines such as psychology and linguistics, and a practical part in which the author will work on modeling humor.
The notion of face is at the heart of this thesis. Face is a fundamental notion in the functioning of human verbal conversations. The notion of face was proposed by sociologist Erwin Goffman and developed by Brown and Levinson. Goffman defines it as the positive social value that an individual effectively claims through the line of action that others assume he or she has adopted during a particular contact.
This face thus has two natures: that which relates to the image of the subject by others via his actions, and that which relates to the subject's desire to project a certain image of himself during his interactions with others. As a result, social face is one of the most precious assets, constituting a refuge for the social individual in relation to his group (recognition, admiration, integration, consideration, respect...), but also one of the most volatile if he is not worthy of it, and can disappear at the snap of a finger by this same group.
According to Goffman, through the attributes bestowed upon him and the face they make him wear, every man becomes his own jailer. The sociologist adds that this is a fundamental social constraint, even if it's true that everyone can love their cell. The student then postulates that the face makes it possible to link the interpersonal attitude and the disclosed emotions of the interlocutors from its linguistic behavior.
She will develop tools for detecting and interpreting users' faces from audio recordings, based on an engagement model, in order to set up a robot-humor feedback control system.
Depending on the individual, humor is a more or less mastered concept, dependent on many personal and impersonal factors intertwining like spaghetti at first sight. This thesis will give you a better understanding of the nature and importance of humor in human relationships and our society in general.
The student has put a great deal of effort into compiling and analyzing a multidisciplinary exploration of the definition of humor to produce a simple, easy-to-read synthesis. The theoretical part of the thesis forms an easily accessible bibliographical base for any curious person wishing to go further.
The narrative is pleasant and the text complete and uncluttered. Even in the highly technical parts, the student succeeds in immersing the reader in her subject and making both her method and her results clear.
"What does laughter signifie?". So asks Henri Bergson, introducing his famous work "Le rire. Essai sur la signification du comique". The intention behind this innocent question is to analyze what makes people laugh, afin order to understand how and why laughter occurs. Bergson draws a number of observations on comedy and laughter from his analysis. His first observation is that laughter is necessarily human. Thus, Bergson tells us:
There is no comedy outside what is properly human. A landscape can be beautiful, graceful, sublime or ugly; it will never be laughable. We'll laugh at an animal, but only because we've surprised it with a human attitude or expression. We'll laugh at a hat: but what we're mocking isn't the piece of felt or straw, it's the shape that men have given it, it's the human caprice it's been molded to.(Bergson, 1978)In addition to the basis of humor as a human capacity cited by Bergson, there are other parameters linked to the contexts in which laughter and humor appear. Humor is not only human, it is also fundamentally social. We must therefore add parameters linked to the context in which it emerges. A joke is all the more amusing when the jokester places it at the right moment in the conversation, or when he chooses it with an acquaintance of his interlocutors. Humor is a ubiquitous value in our societies: education, television, advertising, political discourse. All attempt to master and manipulate humor for their own benefit. If objects can only make people laugh through the form given to them by their creators, what then of the place of humor in artificial intelligence? Science-fiction works give us examples of what Bergson describes. In the Star Wars film series, the audience's laughter is regularly provoked by robots. The latest installment is no exception. In "Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi", for example, Leïa and C-3PO give each other the following lines, triggering laughter throughout the theater:
1 - Leïa: Oh C-3PO, stop making that face!
2 - C-3PO: What face?
The laugh-out-loud absurdity of this exchange lies in the fact that viewers are aware of the robot's inability to express emotion through facial expressions."
The student has identified the forms of humor that can be used to simulate robot humor in a casual oral conversation with the user, based on a number of multidisciplinary studies. The linguistic analysis of Eggins and Slade's conversational corpora enabled us to definish the various humorous linguistic acts that fit into different linguistic levels, which can be grammatical (rhymes), semantic (puns) or even discourse (jokes, riddles). These acts were adapted by the student to generate a humor-machine simulating, in a simplified way, the human behaviors and humorous abilities of derision, jokes and puns. This meticulously selected humor formed the basis of the entire research project on humor in human-computer interaction.
The theoretical exploration carried out by the student shows that humor is a complex phenomenon involving cognitive, emotional, physiological and social aspects. In addition to its important role as an icebreaker, humor can also be used to share experience, fill certain silences, negotiate a request, increase group cohesion and exert social influence.
Humor is a subtle and highly effective manipulative tool for those who know how to use it properly. It can be used to exert a certain degree of social control by getting people to agree with what is being said, by attracting or maintaining the interlocutor's attention, and by regulating the degree, playing on the direction of the conversation, and different values of acceptance or contestation of the interaction. Humor is a weapon of social defense used to disarm an adversary, to get out of an embarrassing situation or to put the laughter on one's side.
The method used by the student to develop a humor-machine feedback control that depends on the different mental states of the participants, such as amusement, sarcasm, irritation or boredom, is based on the measurement of the user's vocal cues. In this way, the machine's humorous behavior responds according to the theory of interaction rites, in which the user's face directs the robot's behavior based on the analysis of emotional, behavioral and linguistic cues from the participant's audio recording.
According to the literature, humans seem to react positively to robot humor. Various studies have shown that humor makes a significant contribution to improving human-machine interaction: when humor is integrated into machine discourse, users find them more appreciative and friendly, and their collaboration is enhanced in terms of both understanding and trust.
The results of this research show that user behavior in response to robot humor varies with age, mood, frequency of use and the scenario used by the participants, all of which can act as barriers to the acceptance and understanding of robot humor.
In addition, the student points out that puns, riddles and teasing can be difficult to detect, understand, misunderstand or simply frustrate users, whereas robot self-mockery and teasing are fairly well accepted.
Lucile Bechade concludes her thesis with a number of different perspectives, including cultural integration, language evolution and the expansion of measured data that can be associated with the notion of face. For the latter, the author imagines using data from connected systems that are an integral part of the user's daily life, such as smartphones and global control systems like google home, to access information about them, such as their consumption habits, all their conversations, the music they listen to and the films they watch, in order to assess our personality and personal culture, and adapt them to our expectations. The author points out that this remains highly debatable, and can be dangerous and give rise to delicate situations depending on the user.
I therefore invite you to read this thesis to form your own opinion on the subject and find out more about humor and robots. Happy reading!
This work was defended on 23/03/2018 in Orsay, as part of the doctoral degree awarded by the Université Paris-Saclay and was carried out within the Laboratoire d'Informatique pour la Mécanique et les Sciences de l'Ingénieur (LIMSI) and the Sciences et technologies de l'information et de la communication (STIC) doctoral school.
Lucile Bechade. Humor in human-robot social interactions. Computer science and language [cs.CL]. Université Paris-Saclay, 2018. French. NNT: 2018SACLS077. tel-01826449
Open access thesis: https: //tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-01826449
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